In the next eight weeks, I am going to read again one of my favorite books, which I associate closely with Katie, W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge. It is the story of several friends' attempts to find enlightenment and meaning in life by following different paths through the 1920s and 1930s. The central character (as imagined in the 1984 film adaptation starring Bill Murray) is Lawrence "Larry" Darrell, a socialite drifter whose tragic experiences during World War I lead him on a reclusive path across the world, while reading much of what we might now find in translation in the Norton Anthology of World Literature. Here is a link about Maugham's life and here is a brief summary of the novel's plot. The title of the novel comes from Isherwood's translation of The Upanishads, by way of an interesting story:
"The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over;
If you'd like to read along with me, I will be reading roughly a chapter a week, and writing some commentary each Friday. I'd love to hear what other people think of this book, its plot, characters, and thinking, though I guess I'm not really looking for treatises on Maugham's shortcomings as a novelist, thinker, etc. (mostly positive stuff, here). The book is unusually organized with few chapters and many sub-chapters. Roughly, I will try to read and respond to the following sections by the following dates:
Friday, May 8 - Chapters 1
Friday, May 15 - Chapter 2
Friday, May 22 - Chapter 3
Friday, May 29 - Chapter 4
Friday, June 5 - Chapter 5 (i-viii)
Friday, June 12 - Chapter 5 (viii-ix) and Chapter 6 (i-vii)
Friday, June 19 - Chapter 6 (vii-viii) and Chapter 7
Hope to hear from, and read with, any of you who are interested to do so!
I have arrived finally to the Bruce Springsteen party, with all the full affection, admiration, and exaltation of someone who wants to make up for lost time. I come by my enthusiasm honestly (if unremarkably). Like everyone else I grew up on the Greatest Hits. But only later, at FIU, did I learn the finer points of Boss Apocrypha from (Miami) Mike Creeden, whose steel-trap mind can parse the legend and the man better even than Fred Schruers or Jon Landau. I stood two weeks ago with my buddy Joe (and his gal, Justine) at the San Jose Pavilion and watched the kickoff show of the Working on a Dream Tour, which went on for three-and-a-half heartstoppin', pants-droppin', Earth-shockin', hard-rockin', booty shakin', earthquakin', love-makin', Viagra-takin', history-makin', legendary hours of E Street Band exceptionality. In addition to having perhaps the best back catalogue this side of The Beatles, Springsteen does one thing better than anyone else working in the arts today: the man plays his heart out, and what he plays is meticulous, sincere, passionate, diverse, and incredibly well-orchestrated. Not a moment of the gospel-tent-show mania goes off with a hitch. A Springsteen live show rattles something deep inside the chest. It creates a sense of communion with strangers, a feeling of optimism about the world and its inhabitants, it embodies age-old ideals that feel fresh and reborn in Springsteen's songs. For someone who has lived most of his life by the mantra, "it'll never sound better than it does in the studio," a live Springsteen show embodies that quasi-religious, transformative feeling long made dormant by our ironic and self-first age: Hope.
In the current issue of The Paris Review, Kay Ryan gives an interview the likes of which I've rarely seen on the contemporary American poetry scene. Ryan is a deeply talented and impressive poet, whose frank lines are mirrored in the perspective she offers about poetry in the discussion. (I paraphrase) Did you crave success? Oh yes, desperately. Do you write every day? No. I sometimes take long periods of time off from writing to shingle my roof. Do you enjoy poetry readings? I enjoy reading my own poems out loud. I don't enjoy hearing other people read their poems. (Me again here:) There's something of a contradiction in contemporary poetry, I think, in that poets are expected to be both encyclopedically-informed scholars and also detached bards whose minds are kept clear to perceive, record, and transform the world around them. Ryan's answers are too well-informed to not have a good portion of the former, but she also has kept things well enough in order to do the latter. A poet recently pointed out that the advent of psychotherapy in the early 20th century created a new field for poetic thought. No longer was the mind just a vehicle for receiving the divine will of nature; now, the thing itself was worthy of scrutiny, could be calibrated, and in doing so the act of perceiving became a subject to explore. There is a kind of inward turn in contemporary poetry that makes sense, but that seems to sometimes exclude ideas about consensus and community. No wonder, I guess, that even the poets sometimes find catharsis in rock arenas.
Cait and I went to a nearby wine bar last Friday, sat down with our wedding to-do list, and over the course of a few hours (and a few glasses of wine), made an organized first run through everything that needs to get done before the July 11th wedding. Off the list, now, are the bounce house, taco truck, and Barack Obama cut-out that was to stand-in as one of the groomsmen. New to the list are things like hiring a real photographer, cleaning up the fish pond, and figuring out who will watch the cats during the honeymoon. Fun holdovers about which we're still excited, that continue to make the cut, include the candy table, a Western swing band, and Cait-family-planned catering, flowers, cakes, monogrammed stickers, and gardens. Two other good details: Cait's nephew who calls us "The Marriagers" has firmly committed to wearing his Superman costume while serving as part of the "flower herd" but worries he might throw the flowers really hard at people. And, our friend Eric has written the first song of what looks to be an excellent revival of the Peace Corps musical spectacular tradition.
I have been listening on iTunes download to the audiobook of "Live From New York," the oral (and uncensored) history of Saturday Night Live, which was published a few years back. It's fascinating to hear how the show came together and what it did to change television. But more interesting to me is the sense that no one on the show had any real idea, until after the fact, that SNL was a success, save its creator, who either made a huge gamble or understood something no one else did (probably a mix of both). After the first show, before seeing any ratings returns, etc., Lorne Michaels walked up to a colleague and simply announced, "Well, I guess it's a hit," and then acted on the assumption that it was a hit until it became one several shows later. There seems to be, there, something of a historical pattern. I have been listening regularly to the How Stuff Works podcasts--Stuff You Missed In History Class and Stuff You Should Know--for the last few months. While they may never usurp my favorite podcasts (NPR: It's All Politics, Slate Political Gabfest, Diane Rehm Show Friday News Roundup, NPR: Only A Game), it seems that more than a smattering of historical and cultural moments follow this same kind of logic: why the Spanish-American War began; how Ponzi schemes work; what the Special Forces do; and, how the USA and USSR have historically negotiated arms reductions.
Springsteen's The Rising is an album I have listened to repeatedly in the last five years, as a source of strength in difficult times. Especially, "Lonesome Day" always gives me a sense that I can handle what I need to handle, that fear and failure are only one part of being alive. Mike Creeden burned The Rising for Katie and me, and we used to listen to it driving up to my folks' place in Stuart. Or, we'd listen to the first three songs. I remember that Katie used to insist on changing the album after that, saying that listening to the album (which she liked) just flat-out exhausted her. Considering how many key changes, power chords, and frank assessments occupy that album, it makes sense to take it in in small doses. Springsteen wrote The Rising as an album-length response to the epic loss of the September 11th attacks, and there's something both unique to that moment about the album, as well as something more universal. Like Jack Gilbert, Springsteen seems to have honed his craft with an eye toward the "big" ideas that are excluded from much writing and music today, and so it makes sense that he wrote powerful, balm-like stuff for an occasion of national tragedy and collective mourning.
There are two Springsteen classics that I can't stop listening to, both from the 1978 album, Darkness on the Edge of Town (I have it on good authority from both Miami Mike and Joe that "Darkness..." is perhaps Springsteen's best album), "Promised Land" and "Badlands." Both are optimistic, full-hearted anthems about enduring hard situations and finding in them hope. I'm making the hour-long drive to campus three times a week this quarter, and often find myself alternating repeats of each song with excerpts from the SNL book. The experience makes for a strange intertwining of late 1970s-era underdog stories. There's this frequently-told story (that I first heard from Mike) in which Springsteen was approached to make an appearance in a documentary film about nuclear proliferation in the early 80s and he refused, saying he wished that the film looked more like Scorcese's Mean Streets. I wonder sometimes if, among so much prosperity, we've inured ourselves to the kind of tensions that permit the flourishing of writing and the arts. Given the economic ambiguity of these times, I also wonder if there isn't on our own horizon some inevitable creative fracturing that will release new creative energy. If so, here's hoping that poetry starts to sell out some arenas. Short of that, here's hoping the E Street Band keeps bringing to town its revivalist rock shows, long after our current hard times have (we hope) passed on.
Kayla Yearout, my niece and blogger extraordinaire, came out west from Wisconsin for a visit last weekend. Traveling by herself, braving 4+ hour plane rides, the harsh San Francisco winter, and the profound contrasts of sunny California, Kayla took it all in stride and we had a great time in the Bay Area, visiting Stanford, Dolores Park, the Metreon Theater, the farmer's market at the Ferry Building, Union Square, Chinatown, North Beach, Crissy Field, and last but certainly not least, the community gardens behind my building and Faye's espresso and video store, where we bought the Sunday NY Times before sending Kayla back home for the last week of school before spring break. It was a whirlwind, wonderful weekend, and I'm posting some of the photos from our visit together below.
In the seventh grade, I went to Boy Scout Camp and won the "Kamp Klutz Award" (Art merit badge). It was a one-time award created by the head nurse to acknowledge my general lack of skills in nature. My first day there, I broke a finger after an awkward fall (Bugling). Two days later, I sliced through another finger on the same hand while whittling a kind of pointy square (Wood Carving). All week (Water Sports), I had to wrap my injured hand in a big plastic bag, which was then taped at the wrist and which, despite these precautions, I had to hold high above the water-line to prevent infection or a bad-set (Medicine). At the end of camp, the various Boy Scout awards were given out--"best camper," "most manly," etc.--and then the nurse came forward to present a two-by-four with five tongue depressors stuck into the wood (Humor), one wrapped in gauze and the other splinted (Emergency Preparedness), which I remember accepting with a smile (Photography), because I didn’t want to be rude and not find the joke funny (Personal Management).
This weekend, Cait and I went camping with some friends at Butano State Park. It was my first time camping since the Kamp Klutz experience, and my first as an adult. I had spent a fair amount of time these last few weeks talking with the Chicago doc about going back into nature, the thought of which generally freaked me out (Cait picked a site free of bears, which helped considerably). In the end, I was surprised by how ordinary the experience was; mostly, I worried that, not having camped before, I would mis-set the tent poles or collect water from the wrong place. Here, again, I pretty much deferred to Cait, who did most of the heavy lifting. Driving back to the city, we went over my pro/con list of the general camping experience, which went something like, pro: making fire, going for a long hike, eating s'mores, sleeping in a tent, and con: sleeping on the ground, peeing in the middle of the night, mud. Which means, I think, that we’ll go camping again.
This weekend, there was a fair amount of incidental gallows humor about bears, dying in the woods, wrong turns, lions, tigers, etc., which makes sense. Hiking and camping are activities that take place in the messy exact intersection of human encroachment and natural habitats. The bear is definitely a kind of talisman for California, and I’m not just cribbing the Chicago doc when I say that it makes sense that, historically, Californians have made their peace with bears through the manipulation of symbols. Negotiating the social/public spaces around bears and bear conversations isn’t any more unusual than the social/public space around camping and, for that matter, nature. I don’t know if it’s therapy, or time, or being loved by Cait and so having someone right there as I do these things again, but areas in life that felt sort of roped-off after Katie’s death feel open again. Sometimes I feel guilty about enjoying those things, but I don’t feel afraid.
Recently, I’ve noticed that I tell stories from my life with Katie in the first-person singular (“when I lived in Miami” or, “I got these cats five years ago in Chicago”). I don’t do this to omit Katie from my life, but rather because being widowed seems such a huge trump card to drop into the middle of an anecdote. Saying instead, “When my wife who died tragically and I were living in Miami, I ate a lot of Cuban food” or “My wife who I was dating at the time but is now dead got these cats five years ago from a co-worker brought them home” seems messy, while saying “My first wife” seems to invite speculation or further discussion that, eventually, leads to more awkward phrasing and explaining. Being widowed in such unusual circumstances, I think, only sort of magnifies this effect, and I don't feel like it's my place to insist that information onto other people. Still, I feel weird about not mentioning Katie in those moments. Recently, a socially-lubricated graduate student started giving me advice about being marriage, and a friend stepped in to change the subject. My general reaction was to feel bad for the friend--he was trying so hard to turn things around--until, sure enough, the subject changed.
Last month, KMF gave out this year’s Katie Evans Memorial Scholarships to two graduate students. Among more than 250 applicants, we found two exceptional candidates who will do good work. That we were able to give out two larger, national scholarships versus last year’s more modest, FIU-only scholarship bodes well for the future. I’m proud of how KMF is growing, and that so many smart, caring people are working really hard to make it a success. It’s also pretty great that somany people, nationwide, workingin public healthnow associate Katie’s name with a great opportunity to pursue their own ambitions and dreams across the globe. Calling this year’s two recipients was a wonderful, if bittersweet experience; Anamarie had warned me that it might be so (she’d called all of the finalists to confirm their eligibility). I was especially touched by how one of the recipients spoke extensively about how Katie’s story inspired her, that she felt a connection to Katie when reading about her on the KMF website.
Things in my life seem to be settling into new and positive patterns. I don’t know what it means to want KMF to be the primary channel of how I publicly honor Katie’s presence in my life, anymore than I know how to manage hiking, camping, negotiating conversations about bears or marriage, or deciding the right way to talk about aspects of our life together. So much seems to depend on action and doing things conscientiously, rather than trying to work them out in advance. Baseball season begins next week, and with it commences much prognostication that seems to favor my beloved Cubs. I have no idea how the season will actually work out, though I think we stand a good chance. I like that old baseball adage: every team wins 54 and loses 54, so it’s the other 54 games you have to worry about.
This week's episode of Friday Night Lights (which you can watch online here) showcases everything I love about that show: great writing, exceptional acting, so much heart and so much ambiguity and subterfuge that looks to work out messily. Beloved by many, many, many (I could keep going) critics, this season is maybe the strongest yet. Friday Night Lights is the sort of show that you have to watch from Season 1 to really get everything out of it, and yet, if more people don't start watching now, it's headed off the air. So, a few things I think you'd like regardless of when you pick it up. There is no better-realized, more nuanced marriage on television than that of Coach and Principal Taylor. As Slate (also obsessed with the show) points out, a fun parlor game is to decide which of your friends is Joe McCoy (smarmy, pushy, self-serving) and which is Eric Taylor (team-player, passionate, straightforward). Wherever he goes, at least once an episode, Coach Taylor gives one hell of a rousing, motivational speech. Give it four minutes of your time and watch two clips below, from the pilot--a scene where Coach Taylor leads an on-field prayer after his star QB Jason Street is paralyzed on-field, then the subsequent hospital visit--and tell me you're not a little hooked. Trust me: it only gets better.
I broke out my Kosuke Fukudome t-shirt this morning, and wore it while running errands. In 23 days, the twice-defending N.L. Central Champion Chicago Cubs will begin their 101st campaign to win a World Series. Seven months of baseball heaven commences, enhanced considerably by Comcast, which carries WGN-Chicago, the channel that televises many of those Cubs games. Arriving out west last fall, I fell pretty far off the baseball radar. My lack of attention at such a critical point in the season no doubt contributed in a major way to yet another Cubs decline and I don't intend to let my team down again. Having addressed the major flaws from last season, the Cubs are well-positioned to roll off the first-ever perfect season in baseball. Short of that, I'll enjoy every last victory punctuated with a big dose of Steve Goodman.
I decided recently to withdraw from consideration some of the poems that I sent out last fall. I'm at a crossroads with a few of the months poems that I originally posted on this blog. They are important, powerful, and meaningful poems for me. However, I've also started to feel some ambivalence about the sharpness of thinking in those poems. There is an immediacy and intimacy in those poems, but also a kind of haziness about what grief means or adds up to. (Disclaimer: the couple of poems that I know are good, about whose quality I feel certain, are still going out.) I am constantly editing these poems, adding stuff in, taking stuff out, reordering the lines, and I'm not sure what they add up to. It's a startling moment, creatively, to think that something that made complete sense in one context now feels insufficient. For me, the most frustrating poems are the ghazals, which I completely love, but which have come back now from some good magazines with the exact same comments: these are strong, beautiful, sad, powerful, but ultimately don't work so well as a group. So, the next step is to revise the batch, and I have no idea how to start thinking about doing that. I want the ghazals to find a home in the world, I want them to be what they are, and I want them to be as good as they can be. And, I'm not sure I can do all three of those things right now.
This morning, the editors at 14 Hills asked, in response to my email requesting they withdraw from consideration poems that I sent last September, "Dear John, What was the name of the poem you submitted? Cheers, The Editors." I am taking this at face value as a legitimate inability to locate my submission, as opposed to, say, general incompetence, or an indifference or hostility to my work (their guidelines ask you to send such an email in the event that poems are published elsewhere). It is an interesting thing to send poems out into the ether of the publishing world, and to hope that, eventually, they return with some definitive word of their worth (e.g., "We love these and can't wait to publish them!"). To a poet, few things are so heartbreaking as receiving from a literary magazine or journal a form rejection notice 9-14 months after posting them. Still, stranger things have happened. Four years ago, Epicenter accepted for publication the only "topical" poem I had written to date, about Jessica Simpson, Nick Lachey, and the Iraq War, and only recently acknowledged, tactfully, well, actually, we lost your poem and forgot to publish it.
There is a kind of resilient optimism to living after a tragedy that confuses me. Instead of waiting for it all to fall apart, I feel alive and vibrant in the moment. Cait recently started a job and I can't wait for her to get home. I still turn (imaginary) hand-stands thinking about getting (and having) a Stegner. I meet Josh at the coffee shop and I'm excited to have a new good friend. I watch movie trailers for the summer blockbusters, confident that the new Terminator movie can be the best yet. In The Art of Possibility, a fantastic book, the authors sketch out two models of living, one based on abundance and the other on scarcity. In the former, life is full of inexhaustible potential whose manifestations we can't possibly encompass. In the latter, there is only so much to go around and if you don't lock down yours, someone else will take it away. Scarcity is seductive because it suggests a kind of injury in things that's hard to deny, while abundance is somewhat scary, because how else do you appreciate things, if not in comparison and exclusion to most everything else? Still, neither inures one entirely to that jerk in the Audi passing everyone in the bus lane.
It feels like two sides of the same coin: either an encompassing ease with or willed ignorance to the fragility of this world. It's like that scene from Annie Hall, in which the adolescent Alvy Singer tells the oblivious Dr. Flicker that he's depressed because the universe is expanding, only to have his mother chastise him, "You're in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!" At the end of last night's Friday Night Lights, Riggins and Street ride in a cab from NYC to a New Jersey suburb, where Street hopes to win back his girlfriend and kid. Role-playing his speech over and over, Riggins interrupts Street with, "I'm pregnant, Jason," explaining, hey, you have to be prepared if she throws you a curveball. The moment is funny and breaks the tension of the scene, and also sort of plays up the absurdity of being overly invested in controlling too many aspects of one thing. Of course, Street succeeds, just as, of course, Street is the actor Scott Porter leaving Friday Night Lights for a big movie career. As a viewer and fan, I lose interest in Street once he leaves the world of the Dillon Panthers, but his life goes on with its complexity, boredom, successes, failures, whether I witness them each week or not.
I learned to love good country music (Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson) from my dad, I learned to love good bad country music (Tim McGraw, David Allan Coe) on my own, and I filled in much of the space in-between listening to country with Katie. Katie loved Randy Travis and Dolly Parton, could do without Tracy Byrd, had a soft spot for Trace Adkins. The first time I visited her site in Rangpur, we walked from the bus depot to her home and got to talking about our favorite concerts. Katie’s favorite was a Garth Brooks show she’d seen in college: you couldn’t miss that he loved making his fans happy. I remember she said that his last of four encores was an acoustic set of Billy Joel covers. I thought then, and still do now, that Garth Brooks, even with his over-sized belt buckles and ten-gallon hats, never quite looked the part. One common aw-shucks moment among Peace Corps volunteers is how you meet people from other parts of the U.S.—and are therein introduced to tastes—you’d never otherwise encounter on your own and, well, there weren’t too many Garth Brooks fans in Evanston.
Cait and I love this Toby Keith and Willie Nelson duet, “Beer For My Horses,” a post-9/11 pre-Global-War-on-Terror anthem for vigilante justice. All last year, I liked to think of it as a good Obama campaign song (“We’ll raise up our glasses against evil forces”), and listening to it successive times, I appreciated the sheer kitsch factor, the naivete and us-them bravado that’s just nowhere on the national radar these days. I first played it for Cait while driving across Utah late one night last summer. We were both tired, so I made this playlist of up-tempo, catchy country songs. I remember how we couldn’t stop listening to Keith’s songs, and how I had to admit to myself that some of them were pretty good for their awfulness. Country music values intense self-awareness in a way that’s very attractive to poets, and few recording artists are as willing to poke fun at themselves as cleverly and frequently as Keith does: check out the Poe-inspired ending to his video for “A Little Too Late,” his other Willie duet, “I’ll Never Smoke Weed with Willie Again,” or the just very excellent chorus of “As Good As I Once Was.”
George Saunders gave a craft talk at Stanford a couple of weeks ago, where he said that one of the important decisions he made early on was to make peace with the things he liked least about his writing—that, rather than trying to get them out of his writing, he embraced them as something that made his writing distinct. For me, distinguishing "draft" level work from "finished" work involves a lot of intuition and trusting that what I've written works on the page, even when I don't fully understand what I'm doing. Just as, on a personal level, gut-level decisions seems to involve less "fire in the belly" and more guessing well and then backing up the guess, to see how far you can follow it. Of course, it helps to touch base along the way with good people who get what you're trying to get at. The Chicago doc calls this having "good mirrors" in daily life. During the first season of Dr. Katz, Ray Romano did this bit about talking to his wife after waking up from a long night of intense dreams. Did we have chicken for dinner last night? Okay, that happened. And did the boogey-man capture me afterwards and force me to drive his spaceship? Okay, that was the dream.
I continue to receive no reply to my essay query to The Believer, in which I propose writing a literary survey of professional wrestling biographies. My general argument is that professional wrestling is the only form of entertainment where the audience knows it’s watching a staged event but interacts with the performance as though it’s real (you might say that Vince McMahon is our contemporary Brecht). In my initial, informal research two examples really drive this point home: 1. in 1990, when the character Sergeant Slaughter turned “heel” (bad guy) to join The Iron Sheik as an anti-American tag-team, the WWF had to cancel a series of events near military bases in the south because of death threats sent by snipers who promised to be waiting rooftop for Slaughter as he passed by; and 2. in 1997, when Hulk Hogan dramatically turned heel as “Hollywood Hulk Hogan”, the crowd became so outraged that it threw everything it could into the ring and one fan jumped over the security rail and ran full-tilt into the ring and at Hogan leaving a perplexed fellow wrestler, the 7-foot-tall Kevin Nash, to pick up and hold off the ground and in the air said flailing fan. None of the wrestlers could safely leave the ring until a huge security escort could arrive to the arena and escort them out. Meanwhile, for seven minutes, Hogan ran from turnbuckle to turnbuckle taunting the crowd on, laughing and screaming at them—even under threat to his well-being, he figured the only thing worse than getting hurt by some flying projectile would be breaking character and ruining the plot line.
The problem with country-and-western music comes, like any art form, I guess, when it take itself too seriously. Songwriters become cowboys in trucks that are tanks while jilted lovers howl like shot dogs, and the next thing you know someone is singing Lee Greenwood at karaoke night. The cowboy is made vulnerable by exposure, habitation, and desensitization. Corruption or decrepitude is inevitable, as is a successor. Professional wrestlers blow out knees, bash in heads, age, fall apart, forget themselves—no one stays a heel or hero too long—yet, invariably, they break storyline to wrestle another day. Redemption is the order of the day. Hollywood Hogan wrestled the next decade to great villainy and vitriol, but in the end, the Hulkster dug out his yellow-and-red tights in truly dramatic fashion: in the end, who wouldn’t rather be loved?
I’m surprised, encouraged, pleased by the easygoing nature of most of the writers I met last week at the AWP conference in Chicago. While there is certainly no lack of mousse-pointed hipsters sporting Dickies or Juicy Couture, talking about modes of discourse, the slipperiness of contingent being, and George Herbert, many other writerly folks just as eagerly chatted about movies, sports, travel, beer, etc., in other words, played against the expectations you fix in your mind when you think, “writer.” One fun night found us up in Lakeview, at Carol’s Pub, Chicago’s original honky tonk, taping dollar bills on the duct tape next to the bar, requesting “Pancho and Lefty,” which I’ve heard at Carol’s six of the last eight New Years. As I said my goodbyes, it was snowing outside and everything was really still, so I turned on Garth Brooks on the iPod and walked a while down Clark, then Southport, past the Music Box Theater, where “The Wrestler” was playing, to Belmont, where I hired a cab to take me back to my brother’s house for the night.
The first song I played for Cait as we drove through Yellowstone last August was Harry Chapin's "I Wanna Learn A Love Song." Chapin holds a special place in my heart for his unabashed ardor, his activism, and for how he sort of collapses many of his songs mid-way through to think big about politics, relationships, and culture. I like how one of his biographers describes his songwriting process: "He loved to create division in the picture, then let you draw your own conclusions." I also like what his daughter said about his legacy, years later, "We all got louder after my dad died." Chapin is a singer-songwriter whose embrace of sentiment and risks of sentimentality still win big for me, despite my usual appreciation for the understated and ironic. His earnestness is sort of the Nehru jacket of contemporary American music: it looks weird when the rest of us try it on, but damned if it doesn't fit him perfectly.
Cait later told me that, as we drove the Grand Loop Mile, playing song after song on the iPod, she wondered, half-joking, how quickly she could get me to marry her. Which is great, because I was sitting there wondering why I was already thinking about marriage three days into our first road trip together. It turns out that, however you quantify it--the nine years that we've known each other, the nine months since I asked Jeff and Sheila what it might mean that I might have a crush on an old friend, the six months into our courtship--the answer, that day, was "about four months." On December 30th, as we arrived to Chicago from Indy, I sent Cait out on a scavenger hunt across the city: the Kopi Cafe, the Old Town School of Folk Music, Bookworks, Wrigley Field, Potbelly's--the works! Making a big loop across the north side of the city, Cait met most of my people and saw many of my favorite places. At the end, leaving my sister and her fiance at Chicago's famous Bean, she walked north up Michigan Avenue, followed step-by-step text-message instructions down to the Chicago River riverwalk, and found me at a bench, where, after waiting out a couple of passers-by, I proposed and she said yes.
This morning, Cait made banana muffins. We'd bought a huge bunch last week, to help combat the stomach flu I brought with me from Chicago, and while I was feeling better, the bananas were all turning a disturbing brown. We've finally set-up most of our apartment--unpacked the boxes, moved some furniture around, thoroughly terrorized the cats--and life is kind of assuming a normal order of things. We keep our favorite CDs in the basket next to the radio in the kitchen, and as she mixed the dough, Cait put on The Dixie Chicks' Fly album, the song "Cowboy Take Me Away," I was here, at my desk in the next room, writing, when it occurred to me, kind of oddly, that I owned that radio because Katie's dad bought it for Katie and me as a wedding gift, and that I first heard the Dixie Chicks while dating Katie, who used to play them on those rare afternoons when she'd had enough Wilco, Kris Kristofferson, Jackson Browne, and Ken Rudin. And I just sort of smiled. Natalie Maines's lyrics can be, at times, a bit rhyme challenged ("She traveled the road as a child / Wide-eyed and grinning she never tired"), but I love her voice, and I like how willingly she continues to speak her mind publicly, make mistakes openly, all the while realizing excellent country music. It's like my friend Marcus pointed out recently on his blog: in our hyper-exposed all-online culture, why are we so willingly boring and inauthentic?
I've gotten in the habit, recently, of using the word "lasers" to explain how complicated things work. As in, "When they get rid of the old space shuttle model, what are they going to replace it with?" ("Lasers.") or "How do they detail ice sculptures?" ("Lasers.") It's a nice catch-all that hints at both the incredibly complicated processes of daily life ("How do they fit all of that deodorant into one stick?") and the overwhelming feeling sometimes that, no matter how well you explain them, certain things (black holes, microprocessors, lasers) will never really make all that much practical sense. It reminds me of a recent Slate Political Gabfest I was listening to, in which someone said that explaining Chicago politics was like listening to Stephen Hawking explain how black holes work: even when someone speaks clearly and is completely understood, twenty minutes later it's impossible to re-tell it to someone else.
There's advice all over the web for widows and widowers who are planning to remarry, from the incredibly corny to pages that seem to have been find/replaced from "spouse" to "widow/er". I haven't made much use of it, but I do find it amusing. Pretty much all of these pages seem to start with "it's okay to be happy again" and end with "so buy a smaller ring/dress" and in the middle offer weirdly-specialized recommendations for invitation wordings and dress colors. It seems like everyone takes stock and works out what works best for them; in other words, marrying again as a widow/er follows pretty much the blueprint for all other human activity. Still, it's made me glad to have spent as much time as I have recently talking to the Chicago doc, working stuff on an individual level, step-by-step. I don't know how people do it away from the couch.
While writing this entry, one of the younger members of my extended family called and asked what I was doing. When I said, "Oh, writing a blog entry about Cait, Katie, getting married again, life in general," she insisted that, really, I should write separate entries for Cait and Katie, that it might be rude to talk about them both. When I explained that I thought I should keep them together because they are both important parts of my life, she said, "Well, I guess you know what you're doing," in a not-entirely convinced manner. I've thought recently about ending this blog, because it's changed so much from its original purpose. Exclusively memorializing Katie has given way to trying to give a view of how Katie remains an important part of my life, as it expands and changes to include other people, a growing KMF, new locations, and now, a new marriage. I remain somewhat terrified that someone who has read the blog for a long while will eventually (and, worse, anonymously) post something to the effect of, who do you think you are and why are you sharing all of this stuff about you in a space that used to be kept reverent for Katie?
That said, I also know that I'm something of a worrier by nature. An overwhelming, Obama-worthy majority of family and friends have been and continue to be incredibly happy for Cait and me. As I've said before, she is an amazing, loving, warm, bright, sparkly and beautiful woman and I can't wait to start this new chapter of our life together. I know that, after Katie's death, some part of me is taking a leap of faith, on a bunch of levels: to love again, to plan a life with someone in a sometimes fragile world, to hope for the best when the best doesn't always work out, just as Cait is taking a leap of faith that we can handle the usual stuff together, even in the face of some unusual circumstances together.
I have that wrong--it's not a leap of faith. I think the thing I'm really trying to explain is how love works, for me at least, that what I'm really trying to get at is how there can possibly be enough love in the world, that I could love Cait now, have loved Katie when she was alive, and still keep her memory and love in my life. It's a calculation that requires listing many, many factors on both sides of the equal sign and still accepting that it works out evenly, that the sum of everything is whole, beautiful, and worthy of embracing together. If the language of that gets a bit abstract and complicated, I can offer two equally baffling, yet strangely reassuring takes on my situation: love, and, of course, lasers.
